Water
Beetle World - the newsletter for aquatic Coleoptera workers.

Sharon Knight Jasper, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Austin

School of Biological Sciences

1 University Station A5400

Austin,
TX78712

You can see the effect a box of
beetles has on me!

Water Beetle
World (WBW) is a newsletter for world-wide water beetle workers (WWWBW). Say
that fast 3 times! This is not intended to be a scientific journal but more
of a news room where our activities can be shared, where we can look for help
with sticky problems, where we can announce our publications, and much more.
It will be up to you, the WWWBW, to decide. My name is Sharon Jasper and I work
on Haliplidae. As the editor of this newsletter, I hope you will support its
continuation with your contributions - not of money - but of your news,
photos, images, species checklists, etc.

Haliplus solitarius Sharp
1882

Please contribute your news, help requests, photos, etc., to
make WBW more useful for everyone!

If you would like to have your e-mail address
included on my beetle worker list so that you will be notified when I make
additions to Water Beetle World, please send me a message.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions
for Water Beetle World, or like most folks, I love a nice comment. If you need
to contact me quickly or ask a question, please use e-mail.

I would appreciate receiving copies of all
papers on Haliplidae, all papers on North American, including Mexican, water
beetles, and all papers on the ecology of water beetles. For the rest, I would
appreciate receiving citations in an e-mail message or attachment to an e-mail.
Please send them to sjasper@mail.utexas.edu.

A faunal survey of fourteen families
of water beetles of South Carolina is presented. Keys, brief descriptions,
photographs, and drawings are provided to aid in identifying the 374 species,
including terrestrial members of those families, that have been found or are
likely to occur in South Carolina.

New World Catalogue of Noteridae

also from Anders Nilsson

Water Beetles of Florida

by John
Epler

is now available in its entirity on the web at: http://www.floridadep.org/labs/cgi-bin/sbio/keys.asp#keys
Additions and corrections are available from John's website at http://home.comcast.net/~johnepler3/index.html.
Also available at the Florida Library are keys to many other groups in Florida,
like dragonflies, damselflies, caddisflies, FW snails and clams, mites, and
more. They are available as PDF files for downloading or printing. If you print
them, you may need to adjust the percentage at which the page prints. For
example, I found the dragonfly and damselfly pages printed well at aabout 120%,
but I never could get the caddisfly pages to print small enough.

This site contains a list of the 90,000 species known from the Nearctic
region, along with links to all kinds of interesting stuff. It's a great site
for scientists, educators, students, and anyone interested in natural history.
It has sections and links for systematics, evolution, ecology, conservation and
much more. Take a look!

Some neat stuff from the late Warren U. Brigham

Also,
visit a bibliography of over 7,000 aquatic beetle
citations posted by Warren Brigham at the Illinois Natural History Survey.
This bibliography has been of great use to me personally and I know to many of
you also. However, Warren's bibliography is not being updated. Now all these
citations (and more) are now on WBW. See above.

Warren
also posted taxonomic information of water beetles at his site.

PHOTOS

Adrian has a website that pusblishes the records of the Freshwater
Invertebrate Survey of Suffolk, England. At the moment it includes
Ephemeroptera, Heteroptera, Hirudinia and Cladocera, but will soon include his
own Coleoptera records. See his site at http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~sbrc/sbrc05.htm

My friend Mark
Wetzel at the Illinois Natural History Survey sent me the following quote which
is appropriate for all entomologists.

"A
human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog,
conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall,
set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone,
solve equations, analyze new problems, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a
tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for
insects." -- Robert A. Heinlein from "Time Enough For Love"